Jesus in India

Stories of Jesus in India date back to the 19th century, and today find mention in a plethora of texts by scholars of varied persuasions — Islamic, Buddhist and Christian.

Hints of this subject came to me during my late teenage years, around the ages of 16 or 17. A friend of my mother, a clairvoyant Dutch lady named Lha (who had lived for years in Tibet) introduced me to many concepts and ideas of things paranormal, mystical, and spiritual. She proclaimed to my parents that their son was a gifted soul that would soon have his real spiritual path revealed to him. I recall this very clearly.

Not long after this pronouncement, I met the Hare Krishna devotees, through a number of encounters that defied co-incidence. My mother, working in an Indian handicrafts boutique in late 1970, sold a shaven-headed man whom she described as ‘a saffron clad monk’ a set of enamel-inlaid brass vases. This was Upananda, and the altar-ware was for the very first tiny Hare Krishna Temple in Sydney’s inner-city Potts Point.

Not long after, another early missionary named Upendra stopped my father in rush-hour after-work pedestrian traffic and sold him a pamphlet describing the ancient science of Bhakti that had just taken root in Sydney. My father came home and handed the single-sided document to me. The rest is history.

But I digress. Scholar and prolific author Steven Knapp has published a fascinating account of the missing years of Jesus. Have a read…